Customer Reviews

The Cat Who Came in from the Cold: A Fable

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Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's Billi engaged me right away and kept me engaged in a wonderful journey into the psyche of one amazingly enticing cat. I have people buying this book for relatives and friends for Christmas and reading it themselves, of course.

Everyone can learn something from listening to this wise cat go on its journey from the wilds into society.

Some, like me, will fall in love with him, understand his struggles and give him a special place in our hearts.

Told from the cat's point of view -- a lovely story of the love and yearning of a wild animal to coexist with Man "kind" -- but is man really kind in this book? Cat, who has to prove his worth, and even then needs to keep his wits about him, seems to be the nobler animal in this book.

And speaking of noble animals, those animals that the cat speaks to, who "surely" have a good life in this world, shock him by letting him know exactly how -- "sacred" and stray alike -- they are really treated by humanity: ignored or brutalized or both....

Shows that human nature has not changed over the eons, eh?

A great read. A sobering read.

I found this book uninteresting: a belabored "Just-So Story," starring a cat, endowed with the stereotypical cat-qualities that everybody knows: independence, curiosity, aloofness. We follow this yawn-inducing creature as he wanders around India, meeting and having trite conversations with other stereotypical animals about the nature of humanity. If these conversations can be said to be philosophical, then they are the sort of philosophy that one out-grows in high school...they're just not very interesting. Not one word of the book seems original or remarkable to me. The characters are flat, the dialogue is forced and unnatural. The ending of the book is particularly dissatisfying, because the cat - in spite of having learned from his wanderings and conversations that humans are "not to be trusted" - nonetheless glibly decides to become a housecat. There is therefore a bizarre, irreconcilable disconnect between the story's treatise and its outcome. Too trite to be of interest to adults, and too philosophical to entertain kids, the best thing about this book is its short length: two quick commutes and the pain was over.